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LIBRARY OF 


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HARPER'S FERRY AND ITS LESSON. 



A SERMON 



Jl 

4* 



FOE THE TIMES 



REV. EDWIN M. WHEELOCK 



OF DOVER, H\ 



PREACHED AT THE MUSIC HALL, BOSTON, 

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1859. 

SECOND EDITION, 



PUBLISHED 



boston: 

BY THE FRATERNITY. 

1 859. 



El 
,"W~ 



Geo. C. Ra^d & Avery, Peintebs, 3 Coeniiill, Boston. 



SERMON. 



" And all men mused in their hearts of John, whether he was the Christ or not."— Luke iii. 15. 

In the grand march of civilization, there has been in 
every generation of men since time began, some one 
enterprise, some idea, some conflict, which is represent- 
ative. 

These are marked places on the world's map in token 
that something was then settled. That then and there 
mankind chose between two opposing modes of thought 
and life, and made an upward or downward step on that 
stairway which is bottomed on the pit, and reaches to the 
Throne. These places are always battles of some sort — 
often defeats. Paul on Mars Hill; Luther nailing his 
theses to the church door ; Columbus on the quarter-deck 
of the Santa Maria; Cromwell training his ironsides; 
Joan d'Arc in the flames ; Faust bending over his types. 
Such as these are the focal points of history, round which 
all others cluster and revolve. Uncounted myriads of 
events take place, and uncounted myriads of men take 
part in them, but only one or two contain meat and mean- 
ing. Each of these is built into the solid walls of the 
world. Such an object is the man and his deed at Harper's 
Ferry. It strikes the hour of a new era. It carries Ameri- 
can history on its shoulders. The bondsman has stood 
face to face with his Moses. The Christ of anti-slavery 



4 



has sent forth its "John" and foreruunner. The solemn 
exodus of the American slave has begun. 

When the national sin of Egypt had grown enormous 
and extreme, the Spikit made its first appeal to the con- 
science, — the moral instinct, — the religious sense of the 
offending people. To the government, incarnate in Pha- 
raoh, these solemn words were slowly thundered : — " Thus 
saith the Lord, let my people go that they may serve me. 
I have surely seen the affliction of my people, and have 
heard their cry, and I am come down to deliver them. I 
know the oppression whereby they are oppressed, and 
have heard their sorrow." And when the nation had 
shown itself hardened in inhumanity and sin, and every 
moral and spiritual appeal had been vainly made, then 
we read that the " Lord plagued Egypt." The chalice of 
agony they had so foully forced upon their forlorn breth- 
ren, was pressed to their own lips, and the slaveholders 
yielded to terror what they had brazenly denied to justice 
and right. 

This is the record of slavery always and everywhere. 
Never yet in the history of man was a tyrant race known 
to loosen its grasp of the victim's throat, save by the pres- 
sure of force. Those mistaken friends of the slave, who 
so earnestly deprecate and condemn that " war cloud no 
larger than a man's hand" which has just broken over 
Virginia, and who teach, through pulpit and press, that 
the American bondmen can only reach freedom through 
purely moral and peaceable means, would do well to 
remember that never yet, never yet in the experience of 
six thousand years, have the fetters been melted off from 
a race of slaves by means purely peaceable and moral. 
And let those who say that four millions of our people 
can only gain the rights of manhood through the consent 
of one quarter of a million who hourly rob and enslave 



5 



them, not forget that compulsory laws, or the wrath of 
insurrection alone, has ever forced that consent and made 
the slave-owner willing. Ah ! this base prejudice of 
caste, this scorn of a despised race because of their color ; 
how it infects even our noblest minds ! 

Those eloquent men who, four years ago, when the faint, 
far-off shadow of slavery fell upon white men in Kansas, 
sounded far and wide the Revolutionary gospel, " Resist- 
ance to tyrants is obedience to God," and who called 
Sharpe's rifles a "moral agency;" now, when the same 
"moral agency," in the hands of the same men, is battling 
in a cause far more devoted and divine, preach the soft 
southside notes of submission and peace which slavery 
loves so well to hear. 

Could that be right in '55 which is so shockingly wrong 
in '59 ? Can inspiration become insanity as the skin shades 
from dark to pale ? I believe there is a great truth in the 
doctrine of non-resistance; I consider it as perhaps the 
consummate and perfect flower of Christianity. But I 
also know that both the American Church and the Ameri- 
can State have always rejected and derided that doctrine. 
They inculcate the duty of forcible resistance to aggres- 
sion, of self-defence, of taking the life of offenders. They 
have no right to prescribe to forty hundreds of thousands 
of our nation a line of duty they reject for themselves. 
In celebrating Bunker Hill, the right to condemn Harper's 
Ferry disappears. For more than half a century the 
Spirit of God has, through the religion, the conscience, 
the humane instincts, the heroic traditions of our land, 
been pleading with the American Pharaoh to let his peoj)le 
go. But in vain. Slavery was too potent for them all; 
now the "Plagues" are coming. John Brown is the first 
Plague launched by Jehovah at the head of this immense 
1* 



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and embodied wickedness. The others will follow, " and 
then cometh the end." 

He is, like his namesake in Judea, not the " One that 
should come." He did not bring freedom to that crushed 
and trodden race, but he is the " Forerunner " — the voice 
in the slave wilderness, crying to a nation dead in tres- 
passes and sins, "Repent, Reform, for the terrible kingdom 
of God is at hand." 

His mission was to inaugurate slave insurrection as the 
divine weapon of the anti-slavery cause. The school of 
insurrection is the only school open to the slave. Robbery 
tabernacled in the flesh, has closed every other door of 
hope upon him. This it cannot close. Do we shrink 
from the bloodshed that would follow ? 

Ah! let us not forget that in slavery blood is always 
flowing. On the cotton, and sugar, and rice fields, more 
of our people are yearly slain by overwork and starvation, 
by the bludgeon and the whip, than fell at Waterloo ! Is 
their blood "ditch-water?" 

Is the blood of insurrection more terrible than the same 
blood shed daily by wicked hands on the plantation ? 

Good men who speak of the- " crime of disturbing the 
peace of slavery by violence," speak of that which never 
can exist. Slavery knows no peace. Its primal condition 
of life is Humanity disarmed, dismembered, throttled. 
Its sullen calm is the peace of the vessel captured in the 
Malayan seas, when resistance has ceased, when the pirate 
knife presses against the throat of every prostrate man, 
and the women cower from a fate worse than death. 

Its tranquil state is a worse tear than the worst insur- 
rection. 

Slavery is a perpetual war against men, women and 
children, unarmed, helpless and bound. Insurrection is 
but a transient war, on more equal terms, and with the 



7 



weaker side capable at least of flight. Who can say that 
" the last state is worse than the first ?" A true peace is 
indeed blessed. The peace that comes from knowing 
God, and loving God, and doing the will of God, — that is 
the most desirable. 

But the peace of insensibility, the peace of stupefaction, 
the sleepy peace of the freezing body, that is not desir- 
able. War is better than that : anything is better than 
that; for that is death. No tyrant ever surrenders his 
power, except under the rod. The terrible logic of his- 
tory teaches that no such wrong was ever cleansed by 
rose-water. When higher agencies are faithless, evil is 
used by God to crowd out worse evils. The slave who 
vainly tries to shake off his fetters, is schooled by every 
such effort into fuller manhood. No race ever hewed off 
its chains except by insurrection. 

Every nation now free, has graduated through that fiery 
school. The annals of our Saxon blood, from William of 
Normandy to William of Orange, is a record of insurrec- 
tion, cloaked by history under the name of civil and 
religious wars. All our noble fathers were "traitors," 
Cromwell was a "fanatic," Washington the chief of 
" rebels." " Heaven," says the Arabian prophet, " is be- 
neath a concave of swords." 

Let us remember that four millions of our nation till 
the soil of the South, and that three hundred thousand 
persons hold them in robbers' bonds. But God has said, 
"The soil to him who tills it." And the North will be a 
furnace of insurrections till the " Eight comes uppermost, 
and justice is done." The slave has not only a right to 
his freedom — it is his duty to be free. And every northern 
man has not only a right to help the slave to his freedom ; 
it is his religious duty to help him, each choosing his own 
means. God help the slave to his freedom without shed- 



8 



cling a drop of blood ; but if that cannot be, then upon the 
felon soul that thrusts himself between God's image and 
the liberty to which God is ever calling him, upon him, I 
say, rests all the guilt of the fierce conflict that must follow. 
In the van of every slave insurrection marches "the angel 
of the Lord," smiting with plagues the oppressor, " till he 
lets the people go." God grant that the American Pha- 
raoh may not harden his heart against the warnings of 
heaven, till, in the seven-fold flame of insurrection, the 
fetters of the bondsman shall be forged into swords. 

But if that dread alternative should come, and freedom 
and slavery join in deathful duel, our duty still is plain. 
At once must the great North step between, either to pre- 
vent the struggle, if we can, or shorten it as best we may, 
by " breaking every yoke." Our Fathers thought that the 
Federal Constitution had given slavery its death blow. 
Jefferson thought the ordinance of 1787 had dug its grave. 
The men of 1808 believed that the destruction of the 
slave trade had dried up its fountains. The result has 
mocked them all. A half century has rolled by, and now 
it is smothering in terror and murder fifteen States, and 
throwing its dark shadow over all the rest. Is this to go 
on? John Brown said, No! and marched to Harper's 
Ferry. It is a great mistake to term this act the beginning 
of bloodshed and of civil war; never could there be a 
greater error. We have had bloodshed and civil war for 
the last ten years, yes, for the last ten years. The cam- 
paign began on the 7th of March, 1850. 

The dissolution of the Union dates from that clay, and 
we have had no constitution since. On that day Daniel 
Webster was put to death. Ah ! and such a death ! And 
from that time to this there has not been a month that has 
not seen the soil of freedom invaded, our citizens kid- 
napped, imprisoned, shot, or driven by thousands into 



9 



Canada. This once free North of ours has been changed 
into an American Coast of Guinea, where the slave-pirate 
of Virginia, with the President of these United States as 
his blood-hound, hunts his human prey as his brother- 
pirate on the negro coast hunts there. When the kid- 
nappers on the African coast would capture a town, they 
surround it in the night, and steal the inhabitants under 
cover of the darkness. 

But our largest cities have been again and again cap- 
tured, in full daylight, and by a mere handful of negro- 
thieves; and their citizens stolen without even the 
snapping of a gun-lock. The proud city of Boston has 
been taken three times. I myself have seen two hundred 
thousand citizens, nearly two hundred police, and fifteen 
hundred well-armed soldiers, surrender without firing a 
shot, to about sixty marines, who held them all j>assive 
prisoners for ten days. And yet these were the children 
of men who started up revolutionists "the instant the 
hand of government was thrust into their pockets to take 
a few pence from them !" No, it is not true that the con- 
flict of Harper's Ferry is the beginning of a civil war, — 
that would be like saying that the capture of Yorktowir 
was the beginning of the revolutionary struggle. The 
meaning of that new sign is this. Freedom, for ten years 
weakly standing on the defensive, and for ten years de- 
feated, has now become the assailant, and has now gained 
the victory. 

The Bunker Hill of our second revolution has been 
fought, and the second Warren has paid the glorious for- 
feit of his life. 

John Brown felt that to enslave a man is to commit 
the greatest possible crime within the reach of human 
capacity. 

He was at war, therefore, with the slave system. He 



10 



felt that its vital principle was the most atrocious atheism, 
withholding the key of knowledge, abrogating the mar- 
riage relation, rending families asunder at the auction 
block, making the State that protects it a band of pirates, 
. and the church that enshrines it a baptized brothel. He 
knew that the cause needed not talk, not eloquence, but 
action, life, principle walking on two feet. He had small 
faith in politics. He saw that the beau ideal of a demo- 
crat was one " that could poll the most votes with the 
fewest men." And that the object of republicanism, dur- 
ing the next year, would be to find the most available 
candidate for the Presidency. And he decided that the 
barbarism that holds in bloody chains four millions of our 
people, for the purposes of lucre and lust, " that makes 
every sixth man and woman in the country liable to be 
sold at auction ; that forbids, by statute, every sixth man 
and woman in the nation to learn to read ; that makes it 
an indictable offence to teach every sixth man and woman 
in the country the alphabet ; that forbids every sixth man 
and woman in the nation to have a husband or wife, and 
that annihilates the sanctity of marriage by statute, sys- 
tematically, and of purpose, in regard to one-sixth part of 
a nation calling itself Christian ; " he decided, I say, that 
such a barbarism was, in itself, an organized and per- 
petual war against God and man, and could be best met 
by the direct issue of arms. For he was no sentimentalist, 
and no non-resistant. 

He believed in human brotherhood, in George Wash- 
ington, in Bunker Hill, and in a God, " all of whose attri- 
butes take sides against the oppressor." He startled our 
effeminacy with the sight of a man whose seminal princi- 
ple was justice, whose polar star was right. ISTo wonder 
he is awful to politicians. The idea which made our na- 
tion, which split us off from the British Empire, and deny- 



11 



iii o- which we begin to die, — the idea of the supreme 
sacredness of man, is speaking through his rifle and 
through his lips. 

He was a Puritan on both sides; and that blood is 
always revolutionary. He had the blood of English 
Hampden, who, rather than pay an unjust tax of twenty 
shillings, began a movement that hurled a king from his 
throne to the block. 

He had the blood of Hancock and Adams, who, when 
King George laid his hand on the American pocket, 
aroused every New Englander to be a revolution in him- 
self. 

He knew that the crimes of the slave faction against 
humanity were more atrocious by far than those which 
turned England into a republic, and the Stuarts into 
exile ; and his glorious fault it was that he could not look 
calmly on while four millions of our people are trodden in 
the bloody mire of despotism. 

It is the fashion now to call him a " crazy " fanatic ; but 
history will do the head of John Brown the same ample 
justice that even his enemies give to his heart. 

It is no impossible feat to plant a permanent armed in- 
surrection in Virginia. The mountains are near to Harper's 
Ferry, and within a few days march lies the Great Dismal 
Swamp, whose interior depths are forever untrodden save 
by the feet of fugitive slaves. A few resolute white men, 
harbored in its deep recesses, raising the flag of slave 
revolt, would gather thousands to their standard, would 
convulse the whole State with panic, and make servile 
war one of the inseparable felicities of slavery. 

Let us not forget that three hundred half-armed Indians 
housed in similar swamps in Florida, waged a seven years' 
war against the whole power of the United States, and 
were taken, at last, not by warfare, but by treachery and 



12 



bribes. A single year of such warfare would unhinge the 
slave faction in Virginia. Said Napoleon, when preparing 
for the invasion of England, " I do not expect to conquer 
England ; but I shall do more, — I shall ruin it. The 
mere presence of my troops on her coast, whether defeated 
or not, will shake her government to the ground, and 
destroy her social system." 

With equal correctness reasoned the hero and martyr 
of Harper's Ferry. He knew that slave revolt could be 
planted upon as permanent and chronic a basis as the 
Underground Railroad, and that once done, slavery would 
quickly bleed to death His plan was not Quixotic. His 
means were amjDle. None so well as he knew the weak- 
ness of this giant sin. Had he avoided the Federal arm, 
he might have overrun the heaving, rocking soil of the fif- 
teen States, breaking every slave chain in his way ; while 
the " terrors of the Lord " were smiting to the heart of 
this huge barbarism, with one ghastly sense of guilt, and 
feebleness, and punishment. 

We have seen the knees of a great slave State smiting 
together, and her teeth chattering with fear, while wild 
and craven panic spread far and wide, from the slight 
skirmish of a single day, with less than a score of 
men, and can judge somewhat of her position if insurrec- 
tion had become an institution in her midst. If Brown 
had not, in pity to his prisoners, lingered in the captured 
town till beset by the Federal bayonets, he would now 
have been lodged in the mountains or swamps, while 
every corner of the State would have flamed with revolt. 
He did not " throw his life away ; " he dies a "-natural 
death," — to be hung is the only natural death possible for 
a true man in Virginia. Did the farmers who stood be- 
hind the breastwork on Bunker Hill " throw away their 
lives ? " Was Warren a " monomaniac ? " Were the 



13 



eighty half-armed militia, who stood up at Lexington 
Green against the weight of a great monarchy, and " fired 
the shot heard round the world," all madmen ? 

Is death in a feather bed to be made the single test of 
sanity? Last year, the word insurrection affected even 
anti-slavery men with a shudder; next year, it will be 
uttered in every Northern Legislature, as a thing of course. 
Is that nothing? Pharaoh may sit for a while on the 
throne, but he sits trembling. 

To hush the click of dollars, and the rustle of bank bills 
over the land, if only for an hour, that the still small voice 
of God's justice may be heard. Is the life thrown away 
that has done so much ? Can our " sane " lives show a 
wealthier record ? His scheme is no failure, but a solemn 
success. Wherein he failed his foes have come to his aid. 
the greatness of their fears reveals the extent of his triumph. 
John Brown has not only taken Virginia and Governor 
Wise, he has captured the whole slave faction, North and 
South. All his foes have turned abolition missionaries. 
They toil day and night to do his bidding, and no Presi- 
dent has so many servants as he. The best Sharpe's rifle 
in all his band would scarcely throw a bullet a single mile, 
but in every corner of every township of thirty-three 
States, the press of the slave party is hurling his living 
and inspired words — words filled with God's own truth 
and power, and so more deadly to despotism than hosts of 
armed men. 

The Spartan band of chivalry, fifteen hundred strong, 
quaking on the hills round Harper's Ferry, for a whole 
day, unable to look the old man in the face ; then murder- 
ing a prisoner, unarmed and bound hand and foot, who 
could find in that shambles no man, and but one woman 
to vainly plead for his life ; then blowing off the face of 
a man who cried for quarter ; then hacking with seven 
2 



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wounds the body of the gray haired leader after he had 
yielded; then before the eyes of the bereaved and bleeding 
father, crowding the body of his son into a "box for dis- 
section ;" then with obscene rage and threats insulting the 
aged chief as he lay wounded and manacled, upon his cot ; 
the mock trial, overleaping with indecent haste the ancient 
forms of law ; the hurried sentence, the mustering of hun- 
dreds of armed men, filling with horse, foot, and cannon, 
every avenue to his jail ; the whole South on tiptoe with 
apprehension ; two great States in an ecstasy of fear ; 
Virginia turning herself into an armed garrison ; the slave 
journals of the North shrieking in full concert. Behold 
on what a platform the insane rage and fear of his foes has 
lifted this anti-slavery veteran to the stars ! Strangling 
John Brown will not stop the earthquake that has followed 
his shattering blow; or if it does, Science teaches us that 
when the earthquake stops the volcano begins. His aim 
was to render slavery insecure, and he has succeeded. " He 
has forced the telegraph, the press, the stump, the bar- 
room, the parlor, to repeat the dangerous story of insur- 
rection in every corner of the South." From Maryland to 
Florida, there is not a slave whe does not have the idea 
of Freedom quickened within him by the outbreak of 
Harper's Ferry. Like the Druid stone, which the united 
force of an hundred men could not move, while a child's 
finger rightly applied, rocked it to its base, this dark system 
of outrage and wrong, which has stood for thirty years 
moveless against the ]3olitical power of the North, against 
the warnings of an insulted Christianity, and against the 
moral sentiment of the world, now rocks and trembles as 
the finger of this God-fearing Puritan presses against its 
weak spot. The fatal secret has now become public news. 
Invulnerable to all moral appeals, it yields, it dissolves, it 
dies, before the onset of force. Like the Swiss valleys, 



15 



the first clash of 'arms brings down the avalanche. From 
the martyrdom of Brown dates a new era of the anti- 
slavery cause. To moral agitation will now be added 
physical. To argument, action. The dispensation of doc- 
trine will be superseded by the higher dispensation of fact. 
The appeals of the North will now be applied to the 
terrors as well as to the conscience of this Great Barbar- 
ism. Other devoted men will follow in the wake of 
Brown, avoiding his error, and will carry on to its full 
results the work he has begun. Slave propagandism we 
have had long enough. We are likely now to have some 
liberty propagandism. 

I rejoice to see a man whose banner bears no uncer- 
tain sign. The North wants no more corn-stalk Gene- 
rals, but a real General, one who is both platform and 
party in himself. He is a Crusader of Justice, a Knight 
Templas in Christ's holy war — a war which shall never 
cease but with the snap of the last chain link. His glory 
is genuine. Like that of Washington, it will stand the 
test of time. Of the American masses, he, and such as he, 
are the salt: and the sufficient answer to all criticism 
upon him is his example. But he was "defeated;" yes, 
and all first class victories, from that of Calvary downwards,, 
are defeats. Such investments do not usually yield " semi- 
annual dividends." All God's angels come just as he 
comes : looking most forlorn, marked with defeat and death, 
" despised and rejected of men." True he "failed," but to 
him who works with God, failure, fetters, and public exe- 
cution are kindly forces, and all roads lead him on to 
victory. 

He had a live religion. He believed that God spake to 
him in visions of the night. Yes, incredible as it may 
seem, this man actually believed in God ! Why, he must 
have been " mad ! " While ecclesiastics mourn a " suspense 



16 



of faith," and teach that the only way to cleanse America 
from her sins is to instantly dress up the church in a 
second-hand uniform and cocked hat, this saint of the 
broad church did not take up the " slop trade," nor cry 
" old clo' " in the court of Zion. He was at his apostolic 
work, "casting out devils." Clearly the "suspense of 
faith " had not reached him. It was the doctrine of John 
Brown that we should interfere with the slaveholders to 
rescue the slave. I hope no anti-slavery man will have 
the weakness to apologize for, explain, or deny snch a self- 
evident truth. He could not see that it was heroic to 
fight against a petty tax on tea, and endure seven years 
warfare for a political right, and a crime to fight in favor 
of restoring an outraged race to those Divine birthrights 
of which they had been for two centuries robbed. 

He knew that every slave, on every plantation, has the 
right from his God and Creator to be free, and that he 
could not devote his life to a nobler aim than to forward 
their freedom. Every one feels that it is noble. Any 
man with the golden rule before him should be ashamed 
to say less than this. He is true to the logic of Lexing- 
ton and Concord, and no American is so loyal to the 
meaning of the Fourth of July as he. He is one of God's 
nobility who had outgrown selfish and private aims. And 
his last act is so brave and humane that politicians stand 
aghast, one party shrieking as if noise was " the chief end 
of man ; " while the other protests with both hands up- 
raised "we didn't help them do it." Of course they 
didn't, it is n't in them. 

Ah, the principle of the Declaration of '76 is utterly 
dying out of our minds. It is boldly sneered at as " a 
glittering generality" by some, and disregarded by all. 
There is to-day not a State, not a party, not a religious 
sect in the nation that accepts that Declaration : — only 



IT 



one old man in a Southern prison dares believe in it. The 
cause of human liberty in this land needs speeches and 
prayers, eloquence and money; but it has now on the 
banks of the Potomac, for the second time, found what it 
needed more than these ; what the Hebrew Exodus 
found in Moses; what Puritan England hailed in Oliver 
Cromwell ; what revolutionary France has sought in vain 
— A Man! 

And let no one who glories in the revolutionary strug- 
gles of our fathers for their freedom, deny the right of the 
American bondsman to imitate their high example. And 
those who rejoice in the deeds of a Wallace or a Tell, a 
Washington or a Warren ; who cherish with unbounded 
gratitude the name of Lafiiyette for volunteering his aid 
in behalf of an oppressed people, in a desperate crisis, and 
at the darkest hour of their fate, cannot refuse equal 
merit to this strong, free, heroic man, who has freely con- 
secrated all his powers, and the labors of his whole life, 
to the help of the most needy, friendless, and unfortunate 
of mankind. 

The picture of the Good Samaritan will live to all 
future ages, as the model of human excellence, for help- 
ing one whom he chanced to find in need. 

John Brown did more. He went to seeh those who 
were lost that he might save them. He a fanatic! He a 
madman ! He a traitor ! Yes, and the fanatics of this 
age are the star-crowned leaders of the next. And the 
madmen of to-day are the heroes of to-morrow. 

It is we who have committed treason, we who here in 
America, roofed over with the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, turn more people into merchandise than existed 
here, when our fathers made that solemn declaration ; we, 
who claim that the right to buy and sell men and women 
is as sacred as the right to buy and sell horses ; we, who 
2* 



18 



build our national temple on the profaned birthrights of 
humanity, the Fugitive Slave Bill being the chief corner 
stone. But this "traitor" is Live America, and carries 
the Declaration of '76 in his heart. I think the time is 
fast coming when you will be forced to do as he has done. 
You will be obliged to do it by the inroads of slavery 
upon your own liberties and rights. What you are not 
brought into by conscience, you will be shamed into, and 
what you are not shamed into, you will be driven into by 
the slaveholders themselves. Slavery will neither let 
peace, nor liberty, nor the Union stand. 

A few years more will roll away, this tyranny steadily 
marching forward, till the avalanche comes down upon 
you all, and you will be obliged to take the very ground 
on which stands this high-souled and devoted man. 

Editors and Politicians call him mad, and so he is — 
to them. For he has builded his manly life of more than 
three score years upon the faith and fear of God, a thing 
which Editors and Politicians, from the time of Christ till 
now, have always counted as full proof of insanity. 

One such man makes total depravity impossible, and 
proves that American greatness died not with Wash- 
ington. 

The gallows from which he ascends into heaven will be 
in our politics what the cross is in our religion — the sign 
and symbol of supreme self-devotedness ; and from his 
sacrificial blood the temporal salvation of four millions of 
our people yet shall spring. It takes a whole geological 
epoch to form the one precious drop we call diamond ; 
and a thousand years of Saxon progress, every step of 
which has been from scaffold to scaffold, and from stake 
to stake, have gone to the making of this shining soul. 
That Virginia scaffold is but the setting of the costly 
gem, whose sparkle shall light up the faces of an uncounted 



19 



array. When the old Puritan struck so stout a blow for 
the American slave, it rang on the fetters of thirty-three 
enslaved republics, where every foot of soil is lawful kid- 
napping ground, and where every man, white or black, 
holds his liberty at the will of a slaveholder, a commis- 
sioner or a marshal. 

The only part of America which has been, in this gen- 
eration, conquered for God, is the few square feet of land 
on which stood the engine-house at Harper's Ferry. 

Carlyle somewhere says that a " rotten stump will 
stand a long time if not shaken." John Brown has 
shaken this stump of the old Barbarisms ; it remains for 
us to tear out every root it has sent into the soil of the 
North. Unsupported by these, the next breath of insur- 
rection will topple it to the ground. 

Said the ancestors of this man two centuries ago to the 
Long Parliament, " If you want your laws obeyed, make 
them fit to be obeyed, and if not — Cromwell," and the 
devilism of England heard and trembled. Their child of 
to-day has but sounded forth the same idea, and the dev- 
ilism of America trembles likewise. 

It is fitting that he should die. He has done enough, 
and borne enough. One such example of self-forgetting 
heroism, sanctified by such tenderness and faith, meeting 
the eye and filling the heart of the civilized world, spread- 
ing its noble inspiration far and wide through a continent, 
quickening the pulses of heroism in a million souls, is God's 
prime benefaction to our time, — the immortal fire that 
keeps humanity's highest hopes aflame. 

To lift a nation out of the ignoble rut of money-making, 
stagnation, and moral decay, Freedom has offered the 
blood of her noblest son, and the result is worth a thous- 
and times the costly price. 



20 



On the second day of December he is to be strangled 
in a Southern prison, for obeying the Sermon on the 
Mount. But to be hanged in Virginia is like being cru- 
cified in Jerusalem, — it is the last tribute which sin pays 
to virtue. 

John Brown realized the New Testament. He felt that 
he owed the same duty to the black man on the plains of 
Virginia that he did to his blood brother. This was his 
insanity. 

He does not belong to this age ; he reaches back to the 
first three centuries of the Christian Church, when it was 
a proverb among the followers of Jesus, " No good Chris- 
tian dies in his bed." Their fanaticism was his fanaticism. 
Hear his words to the slave court which tried him for his 
life, without giving him time to obtain counsel whom he 
could trust, and while he was partially deaf from his 
wounds, and unable to stand on his feet : " Had I inter- 
fered in this manner in behalf of the rich, the powerful, 
the intelligent, the so-called great, — or in behalf of any 
of their friends, either father, mother, wife, or child, or any 
of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in 
this enterprise, it would have been all right. Every man 
in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of re- 
ward. This court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the 
validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I 
suppose to be the Bible, which teaches me that ' all things 
whatsoever that men should do to me, I should do even 
so to them.' It teaches me further, to ' remember them 
that are in bonds as bound with them.' I tried to act up 
to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to 
understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe 
that to interfere as I have done in behalf of his despised 
poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed 
necessary that I should forfeit my life, and mingle my 



21 



blood with the blood of my children, and with the blood 
of millions in this slave land, whose rights are disregarded 
by wicked laws, I say, let it be done." Ah, friends, how 
near is that land to moral ruin where such men are counted 
" mad ! " Virginia that day doomed to death her best 
friend. He who would have saved her from falling some 
day by the hands she has manacled. 

" I know full well that were I a slave and miserable, for- 
bidden to call my wife, my child, my right arm, my own soul, 
my own ; liable to be chained, and whipped, and sold, the 
voice that should speak Freedom to me would be holier in 
its accents than the music of hymn and cathedral, as 
sacred as the voice of an angel descending from God. 

" In the eye that should be turned on me with rescue 
and help, a light would beam before which the shine of 
the sun would grow dim, 

" The hand that should be stretched out to smite off my 
chains, it would thrill me like the touch of Christ. In his 
most blessed name, what on earth have his followers to 
do, what are they here for, if not to fly to the help of the 
oppressed, to maintain the holy cause of human freedom, 
and to stand out the unyielding opponents of outrage and 
wrong?" 

And this, my friends, is the sacred, the radiant " Trea- 
son" of John Brown. God bless him and all such traitors, 
say I, and let the Great North respond Amen. 

The State that has parted with the bones of the dead 
Washington, and that has, long since, parted with the last 
shred of his principles, may now fittingly put the living 
Washington to death ; but after all, it is but little that the 
rage of man can do. 

There is one above greater than Virginia, and across the 
obscene roar of the slave power comes His voice, sounding 
in the ears of that scarred and manacled old man, " Inas- 



22 



much as ye did it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye 
did it unto me." And again, " He that loseth his life for 
my sake, shall find it again." 

Yet a few days, and the bells of New England will toll 
for her departed hero ; not slain, but made immortal. 

He goes to the Puritan heaven of his free forefathers. 
He leaves with us two sacred trusts ; his inspired example, 
preaching to all, " Go thou and do likewise ; " and the 
bereaved families, whose husbands and fathers have fallen 
while fighting our battle. 

God help us to be faithful to these trusts, and to be true 
to John Brown's life and example. 



LB Ap '10 



1 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




008 934 472 4 



